'Contemporary Design Is Very Difficult': Top Costume Designers Debunk the Shopping Myth

By Daniel Okafor

"When someone comes up to me and says, 'I really want to learn and work with you. I love to shop.' That's an automatic exit." Molly Rogers, costume designer of "The Devil Wears Prada 2," delivered that verdict at the Costume Design Roundtable of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival.

Variety's Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay moderated the session. The panel gathered Ellen Mirojnick ("The Odyssey"), Arianne Phillips ("The Invite"), Linda Muir ("Werwulf"), Amy Roth ("I Play Rocky") and Marci Rodgers ("Michael"). Their shared thesis: dressing contemporary characters is the hardest job in the costume department, and the least understood.

Why contemporary design gets no respect?

Mirojnick, whose credits run from "Wall Street" to "Basic Instinct" and "Fatal Attraction," framed the craft as accidental historiography. "In the beginning of my career, I did a lot of contemporary costume, and I loved it," she said. "I loved being able to document what New York was like at that period, because yes, it was for film, but it also documented the history of what we were like, even if it was an elevated contemporary character." Her summary: "Contemporary design is very difficult and very beautiful at the same time to create."

Rodgers recalled her first job, Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It." Fresh from Chicago, she asked Lee to sit beside her during background casting, "so I could see how people are coming in here dressed." For Nola Darling, whose favorite artist was Prince, the answer was thrift stores. "Purple is clearly going to be a thing. But it would be tidbits of purple. She wouldn't shop at Saks," Rodgers said. On "Barbershop," set in Chicago, the mandate was reflecting the community and the fashion of the moment. A professor, she noted, had warned her early: "Contemporary design would be the hardest thing I'd ever do."

Phillips ("Nocturnal Animals," "I Want Your Sex") named the culprits: rich people with shopping habits. "I've been in rooms with studio executives. Directors, writers, producers and studio executives — they're rich," she said. "They have a relationship to shopping, someone shopping for them. They can afford what they want, and they're experts." Actors, she added, will insist they know their character wore those Prada boots. "You have to be, as Marci said, a salesperson for your character. Costume design can be disrespected so easily by people sitting behind desks moving numbers around and not giving you the support you need."

Product placement compounds the problem as luxury brands enter film financing. "We're told by producers, 'You have to use that product,'" Phillips said. Her advice: choose directors who support the story, because financing will only complicate matters further.

What does 5,300 costumes look like?

Mirojnick crafted over 5,300 costumes for Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," focusing on Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope. The House of Ithaca's color theme was burned red, carried through Penelope's wardrobe. "It was very important to keep her in those tones, not to disrupt the story," Mirojnick said.

At the climax, when Odysseus returns, Penelope wears a blue dress that functions as armor. "We created a drape with fine pleats, very tight and specific to the shape of her body," Mirojnick explained, paired with a golden necklace — one of the only decorative pieces she wears. "It felt as if she was ready for battle, and she was going to hold her own. She had a challenge to put forth, and her gown reinforced her strength."

How do you costume a Viking?

Muir, reuniting with Robert Eggers after "The Northman," researched wool obsessively. In Viking times wool denoted wealth; anyone with a lot of wool clothing was upper class. Her best trivia: "There are no wolves in the British Isles because the king ordered all of them eradicated so they wouldn't eat the sheep." Authenticity has a supply problem, though. "The challenge with these films is finding people who can create wool fabrics, hats, jewelry, buttons, belts," she said, with so few styles and elements to work from.

Phillips described her third collaboration with Olivia Wilde on "The Invite," built on trust and a single costume change for Cruz, layered intentionally to reveal character over time. Wilde's Angela is a stay-at-home artist who lost her creativity. "I worked with production designer Jade Healy to make sure she blended into the walls," Phillips said. Seth's palette mirrored hers, and the clashing blues turned out to be the point: "I realized that was perfect because the relationship is out of sync."

Can a sequel survive the cerulean sweater?

Rogers meditated on the problem before starting "The Devil Wears Prada 2." "The first movie is so beloved," she said. "It was a perfect storm — the script, the cast, the clothing. I thought, 'OK, the curse of the sequel.'" She pulled it off, and even brought back the iconic cerulean sweater — Andy would still own it, after all these years.

The reunion went sideways in the best way. Rogers wanted the sweater shredded naturally, with elbow holes. "Annie had scissors in her hands," Rogers revealed. "She chopped the sleeves off, and I realized it's now a vest. I was trying to do menswear a little with her, so it read that way."

What do you do when there's nothing to reference?

Roth faced the inverse problem on "I Play Rocky": the original 1976 film had no costume designer, so no references existed. "Recreating this iconic look — not just from the film, but from my memory and everybody's collective memory of Rocky — the hat, the leather jacket, the gloves, the bouncing ball, they were all crucial," she said. The jacket had to be made and aged. Then luck intervened: "I found the original jacket on eBay, in my actor's size and felt relief."

Actor Anthony Ippolito, she said, elevated the work. "He wanted his body to look exactly like Stallone's. He posed like Stallone. He just embodied his body." He brought photos of items Stallone wore, and Roth's team recreated them.

On "Michael," Rodgers recreated the "Thriller" video with an 800-page research book. Deborah Landis told her the famous leather jacket wasn't the whole story: Michael's Levi jeans were originally white and had to be dyed red. Levi's collaborated, sending pairs for recreation. Using a Pantone book, Rodgers rebuilt the beaded jacket and found two different shades of red — "color value is so important." The zombies got equal attention. "I thought, 'That's the woman in the pink dress. I've got to put the pearls right here.'"

The roundtable's collective message lands clearly: contemporary or period, costume design is authorship, not retail. As financing entangles luxury brands deeper into productions, that argument will only get harder to make — and, per Phillips, more important to win.